Mourn Mandela the man, not his politics

Did a focus on forgiveness come at the expense of black advancement? Marc Wadsworth, founder of the Anti-Racist Alliance, examines the debate

Written by Marc Wadsworth
14/12/2013 05:30 PM

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FRIENDS NOT FOES: Mandela and then South African President FW De Klerk in Oslo, Norway, where they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1993

I SAT next to Nelson Mandela in May 1993, after arranging for him to meet Neville and Doreen Lawrence, the parents of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.

It was a magical moment when Mandela walked into the room at the Athenaeum Hotel in Piccadilly, central London.

Afterwards, in front of TV cameras, he said: “The Lawrence tragedy is our tragedy. I am deeply touched by the brutality of the murder – brutality that we are used to in South Africa, where black lives are cheap.”

This monumental statement jerked the Met police into arresting the suspected murderers after weeks of dragging their feet. Mandela was an international ambassador for the black cause without equal.

But as we mourn the death of the most admired statesman on the planet, it is important to separate the politics from the emotion.

In historical terms black people in the West will understand, Mandela was a Martin Luther King whereas his Zimbabwean counterpart Robert Mugabe is a Malcolm X. One preached forgiveness and reconciliation towards the oppressor and the other, black power.

White people will not shed a single tear when Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe dies.

Mandela, on the other hand, has been afforded iconic status by the West’s leaders and news media.

Mandela served a life sentence in jail because he dared to fight for the overthrow of South Africa’s racist apartheid state. His sacrifice was heroic.

But so was the sacrifice of others, including the often-forgotten Black Nationalist Robert Sobukwe, leader of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, who died in jail.

Let’s be clear, the African National Congress (ANC) Mandela led to an electoral win in 1994, struck a compromise deal with the country’s old rulers that black nationalists have heavily criticised.

Under the deal, South Africa’s black majority gained political power for the first time – black faces in high places – but the old rulers kept a firm grip on economic power and key civil service and other public sector jobs.

Another controversial plank of the compromise was that those people responsible for tens of thousands of murders, beatings and false imprisonment during the appalling apartheid era, from Presidents Botha and DeKlerk downwards, would not be brought to justice.

Mandela played his role as “healer of the nation”, most memorably when he donned a Springbok shirt and cap after the South African team won the Rugby World Cup in 1995.

The photograph used in news media around the globe featured a beaming President Mandela surrounded by white players. It was a bit much for some black people to take, mindful that after the photo opportunity, life remained just as impoverished for the vast majority of South Africa’s black population.

Not that some elite black South Africans haven’t got their hands on riches. Fellow Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu once chided Mandela by saying that the ANC once complained about the apartheid state’s “gravy train”. But, once the party won power they had merely stopped it so they could climb aboard. There are now black millionaires, including controversially ANC deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa, the former mineworkers union leader.

I visited South Africa in June this year and discovered that, 20 years after the ANC was elected, a furious row is still going on about the changing of street names from those of the apartheid era.

It is therefore no surprise the Afrikaner names of the two major cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria have remained the same. This is symbolic of how South Africa, far from being Mandela’s claimed “rainbow nation” is still the Guinness nation with white people on top.

But, with elections coming up next year, political rebels who are ex-ANC, including the charismatic Julius Malema, are mounting a challenge. They claim that inequality in South Africa is worse now than under apartheid.

The top five per cent of earners take home 30 times more than the bottom five per cent. One in three South Africans are unemployed, often having dropped out of school into an underclass scarred by poverty and crime.

Malema has formed the Economic Freedom Fighters party, which is winning big support from the black poor and dispossessed. Now Mandela is dead the gloves are off.